Transcripts
1. Intro: Hi, I'm Bill Singleton. You know, I've got several videos upon skill share on Wash and Acrylic Wash and Acrylic Wash. And the bane question I get is what's the difference? What's the difference in Wash and acrylic Wash? And I'll tell you there is definitely a difference. The traditional wash has been around for literally hundreds of years. I think the Egyptians used it for some of their papayas writings. Basically, what they did was get charcoal and mix it with gum Arabic, which is sap of a tree. Later on, they realized they could mix other pigments in it. The Persians did that, and gum Arabic is the base of that, uh, later is brought to Europe during the Renaissance. A lot of the other artists in the Renaissance used it on up to the present time. Thus pigments got better and better. Better chemistry. The quality of the wash got better also, so wash is basically watercolor cause gum. Arabic is what is the binder and watercolor to that ever seen Got washing water color? Is that watercolors more transparent washes more opaque. And the cool thing about wash, uh, especially for fine art and illustration. It could be very precise scientific illustration with wash because you can re wet it. And that's a cool property, because when you're rendering something, you can put like a little bit of white here and then some black next to it. And then you can tease those two together and get a blended gradation almost like oil paint , which is a really cool property. Now a acrylic wash on their several brands. There's acrylic wash by liquid tax, and I mean acrylic wash, Buy hold. Mine is the manufacturing acrylic wash by, uh, by liquid Tex. And I think there's some others, too. But these air, basically they're called wash, but they're really acrylic, And the difference in washing acrylic paint is the binder, so wash the binder is gum, Arabic and all acrylic paints. The binder is acrylic polymer, so that, in a nutshell, is the main difference. That being said, um, there's it works quite differently. So the one thing I told you about washes that it's real edible. That's that's an important property. That's the one thing that ah acrylics cannot do. Once acrylics air dry, they're dry. That's it. You can't re wet him, can remix him. If you're gonna do any mixing it all, you have to do it while they're wet. So in a nutshell, that's a difference. But in this video here, I'm going to explain. The difference is I'm gonna go through traditional wash and show you how to paint with that and then follow up with painting the same thing with a acrylic wash. And basically, if I say acrylic wash and acrylic wash, it's It's all the same. It's all basically acrylic wash. That's, uh, uh, acrylic paint that's been modified toe sort of look like wash. And the final result of these, they're indistinguishable from each other. I use both, and I have to actually label my paintings on the back. Uh, because if I look back in a few months, I cannot tell the difference. If it was based, painted on with traditional wash or acrylic acrylic wash, it looks virtually identical. What is different is the way you use it. The, um, the way you paint is quite different. Well, they overlap, but there are some differences, and that's what we get into in this video. So, uh, come on and let's find out all about it
2. Traditional Gouache: okay. Today, I'm going to do ah, side by side comparison of wash and acrylic wash. So the, uh, just gonna make it Keep it simple here. So just gonna do black and white? This is a car under watch brand, uh, wash. And when the acrylic wash I'm going to use, um, the whole bind. Acrylic wash brand. So let's get going here. So what I'm gonna do once again just to keep this simple is this egg? So just need black and white for this. So this is really a sort of a grayscale kind of study. Okay, so the background is slightly grey. It's just a little bit off white, so that's gonna help the egg stand out just a little, Okay? And I want to make sure that you could see the palette here because, uh, it does differ what you can do on the palate from wash to acrylic wash. So, you see, I'm just putting on a light, uh, a light wash for the background here. You can put a little bit of water in this, too. Feather it out. All right. And for the shadow, a little bit darker color here, so my paper sliding around a little bit. So what I'm gonna do is put some of this this stuff if I can find one to show you find the package here. The stuff museum putty. Um, it's just stuff. You can see it here. So it is. Just peel off a couple pieces of this and, uh, what I do is just stick it in the back of my paper, a little dab of it here and there. One stick. Here we go. And then, uh, when I put it down here, it'll hold it so it won't see It's not moving now, So just another little trick here. So let's get back to this. So putting this shadow in Okay, so I'm going to be talking about the pros and cons of both media's here with wash and acrylic wash. So doing this shadow. So they both have their pros and cons. Obviously, it's the thing that I really like about gua sh is that it is kind of correctable, like these edges here you saw that one was kind of dry. I can come in and sort of find tune that edge here. My brush. It's a little bit wet. Let's say I think I went a little bit darker. Shadow right in here so I can come in, can blend in that shadow there. Okay, Now, let's work in the egg a little bit. So it's like, this kind of shadowy side here. So, you see, I'm going over this edge where I had the shadow. I think it should be a little darker in here. A little bit of white. So I want to do this in black and white. Just cause it just simplifies when I'm talking about ups and looks like I got paint underneath my paper here. Great. Well, that would be bad if it was the finished piece I was working on. This is just a demo. So it's got a little bit of reflected light right in here. Then this white comes down in here. Okay. What shall rest? A little bit? It's a sump. Your rights. Okay, lets see. Putting in a little white here. So this is the good thing about washes. As you can see, I blended that although this was dry. And here the shadow area, when I hit it with a white and work the back and forth. It starts re blending it, which is exactly what I wanted it to do. It's been a little bit more. Why didn't here? So think about washes. It's very blend doble almost like oil paint. So let's just get that edge there. That's edges a little darker. Anything. Okay, so I guess it. Even though this is, uh, dried up here a little bit in the shadow, I can still blend into it. So when a darkness just a little bit in here stray that I wish my brush out and see my brushes a little wet there. So it started lifting up some of the color, some of the paint. Okay, so it looks like there is a I want to put a really hard highlight here. Just white. Let's see if I get enough. Pure white. Yeah, that works pretty good. Second his feather that out. So Ah, this is dry here. And this is the thing I really like about wash is that she can see here this, uh, on the palate. Here's dried, but you can reactivate it with water. This is something you cannot do with acrylic wash so that this really comes in handy when you're doing a big painting. Uh, if you say you're doing a landscape and you I didn't get just the right color for the full ege or something. And then you move on to some other stuff and you come back to that color. Um, if you're doing it with acrylic Washington, uh, it's not good, because you cannot reactivate that color. You have to recreate it. But with wash, you can come back and re create. You can just come back and reactivate that color again and you're all set. So in that way is really saves time. So I'm just getting us a little brush here just to kind of refined some of these edges here . Uh, I'm gonna work. Spend too much time on it because this is really just a demo, just showing how the paint works. But I don't like the way this looks here. Do you like just a little darker right through here? So from adding wet paint to the paint underneath and then you can kind of blend it in. Since this brush is a little bit wet, you can lend this in, and it picks up the pain underneath and then you can blend it together. Good. So the good thing about Gua sh is the fact that you can reactivate the paint and you can blend it. It's very good of blending colors, blending pain. So I wanted I could keep going into this and refining it. You don't want to overwork it too much because you'll start messing up the paper underneath it sometimes. So this is kind of a hard edge here, so just soften this a little bit. So you know Whitman, brush a little, get all the paint off of it and just use it as a sort of a blender. Now, that kind of just blend stuff together. So since it's wet, it's kind of activating and reactivating the pain under it so that I can lifted up and start working on it. Now see, right here it's so with that it's actually lifting off the paint, which I don't want, and that's one of the disadvantages of wash is that sometimes it lifts off paint when you don't want it to. That's something that will not happen with acrylic wash. So now I got to repair this little light area. I mean by accident, but it's easy to do. You could just keep going back and forth. I'm not gonna refined these edges here because this is just for demo. Really? So that's basically in a nutshell, sort of the acrylic wash technique.
3. Acryla Gouache: Yeah. Gonna move Teoh acrylic wash. So they work a little differently, even know the names, The same acrylic washes. Really? It really works like acrylic pain does. And I've been painting with acrylic for a long time, so my technique is usually more of an acrylic kind of technique, but thinking, like about acrylic washes that you can use it like acrylic. But the final product looks like wash. And I really like the way you are, Schlitz. All right, so I could do the same thing here to it. I'm gonna I picked this up here just so we can see things better. Okay, so, going to the same thing. I can do that little that ground. That great awash. Just a little lighter. So this is just pretty wet here. Just get these edges down, okay? Now we go back in a little bit. The shadow area? Same way we did over there. Yeah. The difference in the Krilic wash is that when this dries, you can't re blend it. And on the palate here, if I probably won't have enough time now, I'm working pretty quick, but sometimes your paint dries in the palate. Once it's dried. That's it. You can't not reactivate this pain. And the other thing that's different is that this edge here, I want to be soft like this one. So let's see if I could feather it in a little bit. It's gonna be a little more difficult. Blending is a little more difficult with the acrylic wash, and when I paint with the acrylic wash, I don't do as much blending, really, That's dark in that shadow in here, so I'm able to blend these a little bit now because the paint's wet. But once it dries, there will be no blending it off. This won't happen. I think it's going to hear now do this little reflected light back up in here. Like I said, I'm blending it right now, but only because it's wet that I'm able to blend it dark in here. It's more white now. See, this is already dried here, so it's not blending it off. A little flick is something in there? Okay, see, like see, this is not blending the areas that dried or not blending with the new pain I'm putting down. So, like I said, you cannot really blend very well with the Coolidge Wash unless you keep it wet or if you use a retard er or something. But I don't want to mess with that right now. All right, So doing this big here, sort of the light area, I'm pulling it down. I'm just gonna kind of feather that and with my brush, But I'm not really blending. It's kind of a dry brush effect over it. So let's see, do a little bit lighter here. They won't do this hard highlight like we did in the with the wash. Then I get a Blinis while it's still wet here. Sort of faith that edge out. Okay, Now, I'm gonna come back in here and dark in that black a little bit in the shadow area. A little bit darker, too dark, so it may look like I'm blending, but I'm not. I'm just kind of feathering the paint back a little bit, Really. No blending going on. So, you see, it's a little bit harder toe to blend and get that same effect. You can blend a little bit with the acrylic wash, but not much, really. So when I use acrylic wash, I use more. Uh sort of a scum bling technique and a feathering technique but very little blending. It's really happening. It's a little bit of white in there. Let's see. It's just dark in this background just a little bit so you can see the egg better. Okay, When I did that, I messed up this part of the egg so I can't re blend it. If it was quashed, I could just pick it up, feathered and redo it. But since it's already dried, I can't. But what I can do is paint over it. And that's one of the advantages of the Krilic wash is that you can paint over it basically , do successive layering. Layering is one thing you cannot do with, uh, regular guy wash, Uh, because if you layer over a color our layer over your paint with the acrylic wash, it tends to just lift up what's underneath it, so you can't really layer it that down. You can see and kind of get pretty much pretty close to the same effect. Just a little bit darker shadow under here. You see how I'm going back and forth. These, um, levels of gradation of the Greys air coming a settle, so you mix it over here and you think it's right. But then you go back and it's not exactly right. So you just kind of have to go back and forth a few times sometimes. So here's this and you see, I'm just kind of feathering this out, dry my brush a little bit, kind of feather it while it's still wet. So it's feathering but not really blending. Let's get the back end of this egg a little bit. So once again I am layering a dark onto that. I'm not really blending it here. It's blending a little bit cause it paints just a little bit wetter right here. But that's about that's good. That's going to get now. Like I said, this is Ah, just a demo painting. So I'm not going to refine it. But I could I could make this egg look perfect in here. Not gonna do that right now. Let's put a hard highlight here, all right, so you can kind of see the two eggs. Get said This is done really quickly, So quarter the pros and cons here, so pros and cons Ferg Wash. It's really edible so you can lay color in and put a color next to it, and then you can feather them together, and you can blend them together. Or you can put a color down and later come back with another color and blend into that. So three wed herbal both on the painting and on the palate. So when your paint dries in your palate with wash, you can re wet it. You've got that exact same color again, and I can go back into your painting. That's the pros. Um, the pros with the acrylic wash is that, um I'm going to show you right now one of the one of the pros, One of the cons with the acrylic washes that you cannot blend that easily with it and because it dries so quickly and once it dries, it is not real edible. So you basically just have to keep layering over it. So But the fact that you can layer over it is a good thing and allows you to do washes and glazes what you cannot do in gua sh so by a washer glaze. I mean, I could put a layer of color over this now uh, and really changed the whole painting. You can't do that with wash if I put let's say All right, let's try still yellow for the background and blue for the egg, so I'm have a blue egg here with the yellow background. I'm not even going to do this with the wash because it won't work as soon as I put any of this color on. It's just going to read mix with the paint that's already there and just make a big mess. But with this, with the acrylic wash, since it's almost right, once it's dry, I can layer over into this. Uh, in fact, I think I'll start now. Still live with this background here. So just get a little of this yellow, and then I'm gonna use a lot of water, basically, So that's basically gonna be like a wash e wood over here so you could see better so quite a bit of water and sets a wash basically so you can see that I can paint right into that, and it doesn't lift up Theo pain, but it it glazes an area an area of color right over into that. So right there That's something you cannot do with with regular gosh with traditional wash that. Want to get that too? Yeah, well, we here in the shadow, but kind of get the idea. Okay. Yeah, the egg is mostly dry, so I'm going to do a little blue on this egg just for purposes of demonstration here. Better blue. So there's a very strong blue is my wash here, so I'm just gonna wash over this real quick. So now, if I wanted to I could, uh, get this balloon here and a little bit of black. You can go back in because it's kind of messed up my shadows a little bit. Second, basically layer back into this again. You say I'm just doing this really quick. And then with my white, it kind of messed up my white a little bit with that glaze. Just put a hard white back on there. And like I said, if I was painting, this is regular painting. I would tweak it and refine it more and more. But I just want to show you really quickly what the pros and cons are. So one of the pros with the acrylic washes that you can glaze over it, something you cannot do with the traditional. Wash. One of the cons with a curling washes you can't blend once it's dry, it's dry, you can layer over it. And one good thing about the acrylic washes is very opaque. So if you mess up something, you can layer over it and just keep painting and, uh, and it will totally disappear whatever mistake you made underneath it. So in a nutshell, that's Ah, comparison and contrast of traditional wash and acrylic wash.
Bill Singleton, Illustration & Fine Art
